Since it is the season to take stock and make predictions, I will join the self-absorbed blogging hordes in summarizing KP’s year (as opposed to pontificating about the 2012 universe or what will happen next year).

This was a year of slow retrenchment, which is a nice way of saying that we wrote many fewer posts and as a result have lost readers. We now average 200 or so a day (about 615,000 total unique views), with episodic upsurges when things get topical. For various very justified reasons my two blogging colleagues could not keep the pace of previous years (we are now approaching our fourth year anniversary). That left the bulk of posting to me, which given my interests and press of other business greatly reduced the scope of topics covered. As a result, we did not cover gender, Maori or NZ domestic political issues in the measure that we have before, so I presume that is where we lost the readership. My most fervent desire when it comes to blogging is that Anita and Lew will rejoin the fray. Their combined talents are too precious to remain unheard, although I completely understand why they need to tend to other things.

On the bright side we appear to have a dedicated cadre of serious and smart (and seriously smart) readers that keep us on our toes.

We banned one individual with very clear, uh, “issues” (and no, it is not redbaiter) for continually abusive trolling, and there is another person on final warning for what can be called nuisance trolling–the act of making a comment just to be snarky, flippant, or to wind people up. That is not helpful and violates the comments policy, so the person has been given a final warning before being banned.

Otherwise it was a year without highs or lows. There were no serious slanging matches like on the infamous Mutu thread last year, but other than Lew’s GC post, there were no major breakthroughs in the MSM or linked to other blogs (although mention should be made of Bryce Edwards’ occasional reference to this blog in his MSM “link-and-comment” articles as well as at his own blog, Liberation). We still get most of our traffic from NZ, with OZ and the US following. Our major referrers are Bowaley Road (thanks Chris), No Right Turn (thanks Malcom), Kiwiblog (thanks David), The Standard (thanks Lynn), Lew’s twitter feed, Facebook and the NZ Herald when Bryce mentions us. We get a fair bit of links from right-oriented blogs, so I take that as a sign that we may be small but are worth the opposition’s attention.

I could tell you a lot about the search terms that lead to us, but let’s just say that “Wendy Petrie’s breasts,” “your ass in jail” and “pink and blue things” are a constant. Go figure, but I am gonna blame Lew for that.

There is plenty of other data to mine but that would be overly self-indulgent. So let me first wish my co-bloggers the best of the New Year in all aspects of their lives. Let me wish the readers just as much but without the personal interest. And let’s hope that KP can rebound and reinvigorate the political debates in Aotearoa in the lead-up to the 2014 elections.

Media coverage of trade negotiations in the Asia-Pacific have largely overlooked the strategic perspectives underpinning different countries’ approaches to the subject. In this analytic brief I outline some of the issues involved, to include potential problems when different strategic outlooks are juxtaposed.

Once again, the namby pamby pinko liberals have gone ballistic about a school shooting. The closet Muslim atheist commie gay-loving half-breed president cried crocodile tears about the deaths of some children and a few teachers even though that many are killed each week in car wrecks, water mishaps and domestic violence incidents that have nothing to do with guns. Reliable reports from Fox News state that the killer may in fact be a Democratic plant used to whip up anti-gun hysteria so that the liberals can continue their secular progressive agenda against the second amendment and God. As the great statesman Charlton Heston once said, they will have to pry my cold dead fingers off my fully automatic, 50 round magazine AR-15 (American made of course) before they take away my right to bear multiple arms.

The hard target truth is that banning guns only allows the deranged and criminally minded to have them. Instead, we need more guns rather than fewer guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens (although perhaps not those of color given their proclivities). After all, an armed crowd is a polite crowd.

Guns do not kill people, people do. Guns are not sentient beings, with a conscience. They are tools. Tools should be readily available to everyone because they are helpful in advancing God’s plan for America. The more tools available the better the project advances. How the tool is used depends on the person wielding it. Just like a hammer, saw, crowbar or chisel could be employed in deranged or criminal ways, so too guns can be used for unlawful purposes. Just because they may be automated and are designed to kill does not mean that they are evil. Heck, if we follow the liberal-vegan-animal rights activist logic, a line trimmer in bad hands is a serial killer.

The issue is not the availability of guns in the US. It is about the prevalence of nutters in an increasingly non-religious multicultural society where traditional Anglo-Saxon values, to include worship respect for firearms, is no longer as sacrosanct as it was in the good old white patriarchical days (although it is a concern that black folk do not appear to shoot up schools, malls and workplaces as much as white folk do, but that probably has more to do with them having criminal records before reaching the legal gun buying age rather than any moral aversion–at least that is what my preacher tells me). Left morally rudderless by the decline of US civilization caused by the secular progressive communist non-Judeo-Christian feminist agenda, troubled youth will wrongfully employ the tools of the righteous.

With that in mind, as responsible gun fetischists the NRA has consistently lobbied for better security at schools. But unlike passive measures like metal detectors, rent-a-cops and triple locked gates during school hours, we advocate the arming of all school teachers and administrative staff. We have also undertaken studies that demonstrate that 10 year olds who have taken a gun safety course are quite capable of carrying concealed weapons and using them to good effect in self-defense situations, including those that may arise in schools. We say that it is better to target the solution rather than the problem because any solution that seeks to limit ownership of guns IS the problem.

We believe this even though we are fully aware that public schooling is a yoke placed around the necks of parents and children by big government, be it local, state or national. We understand that public sector employees, to include teachers and school administrators, comprise a large part of the enemy within. But as parents, siblings and spouses going about their lives, they have a right to defend themselves by force in the face of tyranny or criminal intent.

The bottom line is that this latest tragedy would not have happened if the principal, teachers and fourth grade students at this particular school had been armed. Say what they might, the liberals cannot escape that bullet proof logic.

Johns Key’s answers to the “mystery” of the US Air Force executive jet parked at Wellington during Hobbit mania gives us a good indication of his attitude towards the public and the press. Although the plane was misidentified several times by reporters as a private plane, it is in fact part of a fleet of US Air Force transport aircraft that are used regularly to fly high level politicians and bureaucrats to foreign meetings. The make, model, livery, insignia and identification number would have been readily recognizable to plane spotters, so Mr. Key was correct in saying that there was no secret to its visit. It was how he answered the question of who the visitors on the plane were that gives an indication of his current mindset.

His initial response is that he did not know who was on the plane or the purpose of its visit. He said he may have seen the name of a visitor on a piece of paper but could not recall it. As Minister of Intelligence and Security that would seem to be an odd thing to say, especially since it played (now apparently purposefully) on the “brain fade” impression he developed as a result of his forgetfulness about the Dotcom/GCSB illegal espionage case.

What is puzzling is that he could have said any number of things: that he did not discuss intelligence and security matters in principle; did not discuss “quiet” visits by foreign (US) officials as a matter of policy; did not discuss the visits of foreign intelligence officials; or that he could not confirm or deny the presence of any such on NZ soil. It would be the same if he refused to comment on military matters citing operational security (but where again, he obfuscates and prevaricates rather than just offer a straight answer or refusal to comment). He could have said any of these things and the story would have died.

Under a second day of questioning he admitted that the plane carried a high-ranking US intelligence official to meetings with NZ intelligence officials and that the meetings involved counterparts from other foreign intelligence agencies. He denied these were meetings of the Echelon/5 Eyes partners even while saying that they hold regular meetings in NZ, the latest in July or February (depending on which version of his recollection one chooses to believe).

This comes at a time when the 5 Eyes community have been rocked by a major spy scandal in Canada, where a naval intelligence officer sold highly sensitive tactical and strategic signals intelligence data to the Russians for five years before his arrest in early 2012 (which would require the adoption of a number of sanitizing and preventative counter-measures throughout the network). It comes after the obfuscations and weirdness surrounding the GCSB involvement in the Dotcom case (which may well have started before Dotcom arrived in NZ because the NSA–the lead agency in the Echelon network–was already monitoring Dotcom prior to his arrival and would have likely asked that the GCSB continue the surveillance after he crossed the border). It also comes at a time when Huwaei is under scrutiny by the Echelon partners for its possible involvement in Chinese signals intelligence collection efforts, which are focused on the West in general and 5 Eyes countries in particular.

Under the circumstances a visit by senior 5 Eyes counterparts to discuss matters of common concern would not be unusual or untoward, if nothing else as an information-sharing exercise or so that they could get their ducks in a row on matters of institutional or public interest.

Thus the question begs as to why Mr. Key did not just refuse to comment citing matters of national security but instead opted to play dumb and incompetent, thereby heightening initial interest in the story?

My belief is that he has general contempt for the public’s intelligence on matters of foreign affairs and security, and that he believes the masses are not interested in the subject anyway. But his focused contempt is of the press or at least non-submissive members of it. His brain fade act is more than simply lying. It is the deliberate winding up of the press over matters that, while not inconsequential, are relatively routine or non-controversial but which he can successfully cover up so that press inquires are frustrated needlessly. In other words, he is taking the piss out of the media.

He has similar contempt for those who oppose or question his policies. He recently said that anti-TPP activists should be ignored (even though these include a large number of distinguished subject experts, academicians, politicians and former and current trade specialists). This adds to his list of those that should be ignored, including mining safety experts, environmental scientists, Maori rights activists and asset sales opponents.

The point is that as Minister of Intelligence and Security Mr. Key could respond to questions about intelligence and security in an authoritative manner that does not compromise either while demonstrating his command of the portfolio. That he choose not to do so and instead pleads memory loss and disinterest in these two vital components of national security suggests that he is doing so either because he really is clueless and out of his depth on intelligence and security or, more likely to my mind, he is deliberately doing so just to wind up his “enemies” in the press while dismissing detractors in civil society against a larger backdrop of public disinterest.

He is also being contemptuous of those who serve under him in critical national security roles because his feigned ignorance leaves those leading intelligence and security agencies hanging out to dry in the event that something in their purview but under his ministerial watch goes sour. Truth be told, by the terms of his ministerial portfolio he is briefed regularly and exactly on all matters of intelligence and security. Either that, or the institutional edifice of security in NZ is praetorian, something that I doubt its security partners would accept, much less agree to.

If Mr. Key is not clueless on intelligence and security matters, then the “spy” plane response and his other actions show that along with being contemptuous of those who may seek to hold him to account, he is arrogant, irresponsible, disloyal, mean-spirited and vindictive as well. To which can be added one more trait that has emerged in Mr. Key as of late: callous narcissism.

When asked recently what he was the most sorry for over the last year, he answered that it was the failure to convince the public of the benefits of the mixed ownership model. He was not as sorry about the deaths of five NZDF troops in Afghanistan, or the needless deaths and continuing failure to retrieve the bodies of the Pike River miners, or the ongoing debacle that is the Christchurch reconstruction process, nor about the leaks of private information by government agencies or the unhappy disputes with Maori over treaty settlement issues (in fact, he made no mention of these). Instead, he most laments the failure of a pet economic project to gain public traction in 2012.